Three days previously Anna had been returning from the district capital, walking along beside the river on ground that vibrated, awakened by the break-up of the ice, by the sounds of the thaw. The sunlight, the creaking collisions of ice floes, and the wild chill of the liberated waters were mingled together in a joyful giddiness. The people Anna passed had dazed looks, confused smiles, as if they had been caught drunk in broad daylight. When she went up to the old wooden bridge at the end of the village she thought for a second she must be drunk herself: the bridge no longer straddled the river but reared up, turned in the direction of the current. It must only just have been torn loose, for the children running between its handrails had not yet noticed anything, fascinated by the frenzied whirling of the ice blocks, and their crashing against the pillars. If she had been able to call to them she could have stopped them going to the end of the bridge. But all she could do was hasten her step, then run, then make her way down the frozen slope of the riverbank. Like beads on a broken necklace the children had slipped down into a gulf of black water. The rescue should have been a noisy one, attracting lots of people, but on the deserted riverbank in the sunshine there was just the sound of a little whimpering and the crunching of broken ice. Anna dove into the water, feeling with her hands for the little bodies that had just disappeared. She struggled against each second of cold, first pushed the children up onto the riverbank, then dragged them toward the nearest izba, undressed them, rubbed them down. Her own body was ice and, an hour later, fire.
It was only a month after the funeral that Nikolai found the forgotten envelope almost by chance. Elegant handwriting that he did not recognize and which had no connection with the capital letters he had taught Anna stared up at him. And yet it was indeed a letter from his wife. She told him her real name, the name of her father, the great landowner whose estate used to border on the lands belonging to Dolshansky, a distant relative of their family. She did not want to take the lie to the grave with her. She thanked him for having saved her life, for having taught her life. Nikolai spent several days getting used, not to Anna's absence, but to her new presence in the years they had lived together and in the years before. He had to picture Anna as a young girl who had lived in St. Petersburg, went on long journeys abroad, and whom nothing had prepared for meeting him and living in an izba at Dolshanka. Sasha had told him what the letter had not time to tell.
One night he woke up, struck by the vividness of what he had just dreamed. The light in this dream was the same pale light before the dawn as outside the window. He was walking toward a forest so tall that, even with his head tilted back, he could not see the tops of the trees. He was moving forward, guided by singing that drew him ever closer: its resonance embraced all the beauty of this forest still swathed in night mist, all the expanse of the sky as it began to grow pale, and even the delicate shapes of the leaves he brushed aside on his way. At the surface of his dream there fizzled a doubt: "She can't sing… She's…" But he went on walking, recognizing the voice better and better.
He recounted this dream to Sasha, who still came to see them in Dolshanka, as in the old days.
A year and a half later, one fine morning in June, Nikolai was returning from the town on horseback. The sun was not yet risen and the forest beside which the road ran had the resonance of a vast, empty cathedral nave. The calls of the birds still had a muted, nocturnal sound. Before making his way up a sandy slope he turned aside, and went into the forest, searching for the place known only to himself. But more than twenty years later the glade of long ago was disappearing under a whole copse of aspen. He was about to rejoin the road when suddenly a thunder of hoofbeats arose. The noise was growing louder so rapidly that it could only be a horse ridden at full gallop. Nikolai tugged at the reins a little, and stationed himself behind a tree. A horseman appeared on the road. A soldier crouched over the mane of his horse, welded to it as if into a single dark arrow, streaking past the trunks of the birch trees. His face was frozen in a grimace, baring his teeth. "A madman," Nikolai said to himself, tossing his head. The dust swirled gently around the marks left by the flurry of hooves.
Passing through the village adjacent to Dolshanka, he noticed the simpleton sitting on a stack of felled pine trees. Several of the trunks had already been squared off, trickles of resin gleamed on their pink flesh, like drops of honey. The sight of this pale wood, ready to be erected into the wall of an izba, promised happiness. The simpleton was asleep, her mouth half open, as if she had some news to tell. Her hand, as she slept, continued to shuffle her glass treasures, scattered over the worn fabric of her dress.
On arrival at Dolshanka close to noon Nikolai saw a big crowd in front of the village soviet. The women were weeping, the men frowning, the children laughing and being cuffed. A voice repeated several times, mechanically, "Hitler, Hitler…" Others were saying, "The Germans." The war had just begun.
It seemed to him that there was no disruption in the sequence of days. Quite simply the normal routine of work in the fields now found correspondence in the parallel advance of the front line. The names of the fallen cities left him incredulous, these were already in the depths of Russia, where the presence of the Germans seemed like an optical illusion, a cartographical error. He remembered the films of the past few years: the enemy was always defeated close to the frontier. The songs he found himself humming promised, "Like Stalin, we'll confront the foe!"
Vitebsk, Chernigov, Smolensk…
One day even this bizarre topography disappeared. Cities were on the move, as if on a crumpled map. Routed Soviet soldiers fled through Dolshanka: the Germans had encircled several divisions. The village, surrounded, found itself on a strange territory located within the enemy army. The circle tightened, driving the villagers into the forest, then beyond the river all riddled with bullets, onto a charred wheatfield, and finally into the main street of the district capital, where there was still fighting. People stumbled about on this map that was being ripped apart under their feet, crumpled by tank tracks, pitted with explosions. With a rifle picked up close by a dead soldier Nikolai hid behind a fence observing the Germans' progress. They seemed not to notice the tremors of the map, advanced calmly, with precise and economical movements: a burst of gunfire, a house burned with a flamethrower, a tank clearing the street ahead of them.
He left his hiding place, the smoke from the blaze burned his eyes. A number of civilians ran across the road with a determined air. They must know the way out of the encircled town. He followed them as far as the long trains on the railroad sidings, near the station. One by one they dove under one train, then under another. When Nikolai climbed up from beneath the last train he just had time to catch sight of the German soldiers stationed at the bottom of the embankment, precisely where people were coming out. He did not feel the pain but had time to think of his son, already mobilized. "I must tell Pavel these people are machines." The soldiers kept firing, reloading, firing. If fugitives had continued to emerge from beneath the train these nine soldiers would have spent the rest of their lives killing them.
4
Pavel believed those minutes would continue ripping his sleep apart for long nights to come: the din of the caterpillar tracks a few inches above his head, the collapse of the trench he had fallen into when trying to get away ahead of the tanks. If he had not stumbled he would have continued running amid the breathless stampede and panic of the other soldiers. But he had slipped on a lump of clay, hurtled into a trench that was half dug and therefore quite shallow, had not had time to get up again. The roaring bulk had covered him with its shadow, the steel links of one track were hacking at the earth just above his face. For a moment he had felt as if he were being sucked into the entrails of the machine. The acid smell of the metal and the glaucous trail of the exhaust had filled his lungs. From beyond the trench cries and the crunch of bodies under the tank tracks could be heard through the throbbing of the engines.